I have recently looked into the concept of alternate keys. While this is not physically implemented by any major database vendor as far as I understand, it can be faked. If you make a column not-null and unique, it is, for all intents and purposes a primary key (or candidate key).

My question is, is there any way to make hibernate recognize a not-null unique column as special and allow me to use session.load to get the object that has that "alternate key"? Can I have more than one <id> element?

If you are interested in this topic, I found an interesting thread discussing it here:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&l ... 26rnum%3D1